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number of words in a particular book of the bible

Does anyone know of an easy way to get the total number of words in a particular book, say, Isaiah in WTT?

At present, the title page of each version shows the numbers of chapters and verses, total number of words and number of unique words for the whole bible (or the NT if OT is not available for that version). But individual book stats are not available.

For a particular book, the context menu shows the numbers of verses and unique words, but not the total number of words. Of course, I can copy the list to word, convert it to a table and extract the number column to excel and add the numbers together to get the total number of words, but this seems a very clumsy way of doing it.

One easy way

To find all the words in Isaiah that are in the WTT (=BHS) version:
Select WTT in the command line: wtt ENTER (after each time)
Limit search to Isaiah: l isa
Search for every word: .*
Open Word List Manager via button bar or Tools menu > Analyzing the text
Click at bottom on "Load or Generate Word List"

For version, make sure it is WTT

For Source, choose "Load highlighted words from last query"

Click on "Create List"

Results are displayed at the bottom of the Word List pane: 7066 unique words occurring a total of 17197 times

Does anyone know of an easy way to get the total number of words in a particular book, say, Isaiah in WTT?

At present, the title page of each version shows the numbers of chapters and verses, total number of words and number of unique words for the whole bible (or the NT if OT is not available for that version). But individual book stats are not available.

For a particular book, the context menu shows the numbers of verses and unique words, but not the total number of words. Of course, I can copy the list to word, convert it to a table and extract the number column to excel and add the numbers together to get the total number of words, but this seems a very clumsy way of doing it.

Any suggestions?

You can also use the context tab in BW9. One of the three panes there is labeled "Book context"; that gives you the number of verses and, just after that, the number of words. So as I look at Romans, it gives me automatically the figure of 433 verses and 1050 words. You can also do a right click and click on "Export list to Word list manager." That will immediately build the list of the words of that book in the manager, which will also specify the number of words imported, i.e. (for Romans), 1050 in 7111 occurrences.

That's even easier than the other solution and uses functions in the way for which they were designed.

You can also use the context tab in BW9. One of the three panes there is labeled "Book context"; that gives you the number of verses and, just after that, the number of words. So as I look at Romans, it gives me automatically the figure of 433 verses and 1050 words. You can also do a right click and click on "Export list to Word list manager." That will immediately build the list of the words of that book in the manager, which will also specify the number of words imported, i.e. (for Romans), 1050 in 7111 occurrences.

That's even easier than the other solution and uses functions in the way for which they were designed.

Blessings,

Donald Cobb
Aix-en-Provence, France

Thank you very much, Mark and Donald, for your prompt help. Donald's solution works particularly well with morphological text WTM and BNM, as it shows the true number of unique words taking into account of morphological differences.

I have a further question: how can you find the (true) number of unique words that occur less than X times in the whole or part of the bible (e.g. words in Isaiah that occur less than 5 times in OT; words in Romans that occur less than 10 times in NT, or LXX or NT+LXX). It will be nice to be able to also have the number excluding proper nouns (as proper nouns usually present no difficulty even though they might be rare words).

I am involved in bible translation and stats like that would help me gauge the difficulty and time required to translate a particular book of the bible, and also estimate the time required for the whole bible based on samples with various stats.

You can also use the context tab in BW9. One of the three panes there is labeled "Book context"; that gives you the number of verses and, just after that, the number of words. So as I look at Romans, it gives me automatically the figure of 433 verses and 1050 words. You can also do a right click and click on "Export list to Word list manager." That will immediately build the list of the words of that book in the manager, which will also specify the number of words imported, i.e. (for Romans), 1050 in 7111 occurrences.

That's even easier than the other solution and uses functions in the way for which they were designed.

Good thinking, Donald! I had been thinking there was something like that, but I looked under Words rather Context as you rightly did.

A few ways...

Originally Posted by acheung

I have a further question: how can you find the (true) number of unique words that occur less than X times in the whole or part of the bible (e.g. words in Isaiah that occur less than 5 times in OT; words in Romans that occur less than 10 times in NT, or LXX or NT+LXX). It will be nice to be able to also have the number excluding proper nouns (as proper nouns usually present no difficulty even though they might be rare words).

I can think of a number of ways of doing this... The Word List Manager can do this well. I describe that later. For now, here are a few ways:

File > Open > select gntvoc.vrc file for the Greek NT or hotvoc.vrc for the Hebrew OT

Go to Tools > Filter:

Uncheck Filter by Chapter Range / Filter by Frequency Range

Choose “Include only words in this verse range” (near bottom)

Choose “Calculate frequencies from verse range”

In verse range box, enter, “~~~~~” << You will need to enter book and chapter:verse range; e.g. Matthew 1:1-28.20 << i.e., you will need to know the last chapter:verse in book

Click Apply

Back in the Flashcard Module, click on “Freq” column head to sort by frequency (i.e., frequency of usage in NT, not your passage)

You now have a list of words with an indication of how many times they occur in this passage compared to how many times they occur in the OT or NT: e.g., 15/5777 means it occurs 15 times in this book and 5777 in whole Testament

Range box, enter, “~~~~~” << You will need to enter book and chapter:verse range; e.g. Matthew 1:1-28.20 << i.e., you will need to know the last chapter:verse in book

You need to select at least one lexicon (but it won't matter since we are not going to ask to display it)

Leave the “Include Biblical Text…” box empty

In the “Analyze these Greek…” box, enter BNT or BGT depending on #2 above

In the Report Options, the only box you need to check is “Include Frequency Lists (Grk)”

If you want your report to come out by frequency instead of alphabetically, check “Sort Frequency List by Frequency”

Click “Build Report”

Use Tab ViewThis really won't give you the summary overview you want, but remember that as you move your mouse over a text with the "Use" tab open on the right, it automatically tells you how many times that word occurs in the book and in how many verses or how many times in how many verses in that whole version.

You now have a listing of all the words with their frequency in that version

To make things easier for later, you can save that word list: File > Save the IEL and label it clearly

To open it later, you will click on Load or Generate Word List, then choose "Load words from an inclusion/exclusion file" and create the list

Now you want to edit the list to your desired frequency range. E.g., to create a list of words that are used 50 times are less, click on the first word in the list, scroll down until you find the last word that is used 51 times, then SHIFT and click on that word to choose all the words used 51 or more times. Now use Edit > Delete selected.

Save this list with an appropriate title for later

Now you want to create a list of words in the book you are interested in.

Choose the Secondary Word List, then Load or Generate Word List

In Version, choose WTM, BGM (for LXX and NT), or BNM

In Source, use "Load words from a Bible version"

In Verse Range, type the first three letters of the book (The first three letters of a book name is the default abbreviation used in BibleWorks for all but Judges/Jdg and Philemon /Phm.)

Uncheck boxes at bottom

Create the list

You now have the list of words w/ the desired frequency in the main window and the list of words in the particular book > use Select > Select words common to both lists

The highlighted words will show you the words that occur with the given frequency

Thanks for going through all the steps to come up with the list of words, Mark H.. The only short-coming with this is that it does not seem to exclude proper nouns. Using the Word List Manager I produced a list of all lemmas in BGM used 50 times and under, but then I had to go through the list one by one to exclude the proper nouns. I started with hapax legomena, and I'm up to excluding those used twice. It is going to take a long, long time to exclude all of the proper nouns. But I do not know a way to exclude them automatically using the Word List Manager. I also noticed that especially the Old Testament portion of BGM (=BLM) has some mistakes. For example, it may have a genitive or accusative form listed as a separate lemma from the nominative. So there are actually fewer lemmas than what BGM states. I have reported some of these cases to BW when I have found them, so perhaps in future releases this will be cleaned up a bit. There are not a lot of these cases, but there are some, especially when it comes to proper nouns.
For what it's worth.
Mark Eddy

You now have a listing of all the words with their frequency in that version

To make things easier for later, you can save that word list: File > Save the IEL and label it clearly

To open it later, you will click on Load or Generate Word List, then choose "Load words from an inclusion/exclusion file" and create the list

Now you want to edit the list to your desired frequency range. E.g., to create a list of words that are used 50 times are less, click on the first word in the list, scroll down until you find the last word that is used 51 times, then SHIFT and click on that word to choose all the words used 51 or more times. Now use Edit > Delete selected.

Save this list with an appropriate title for later

Now you want to create a list of words in the book you are interested in.

Choose the Secondary Word List, then Load or Generate Word List

In Version, choose WTM, BGM (for LXX and NT), or BNM

In Source, use "Load words from a Bible version"

In Verse Range, type the first three letters of the book (The first three letters of a book name is the default abbreviation used in BibleWorks for all but Judges/Jdg and Philemon /Phm.)

Uncheck boxes at bottom

Create the list

You now have the list of words w/ the desired frequency in the main window and the list of words in the particular book > use Select > Select words common to both lists

The highlighted words will show you the words that occur with the given frequency

Thank you very much for your kind help. For now, I found an approximate method to exclude proper nouns by searching for them in morphological assistant:
1. type wtm [enter] in command line
2. l isa
3. go to morphological assistant, select POS: noun, type: Proper name, lemma: *, which results in code @np--*, then Lookup and yield 191 forms, 1239 hits
4. I can subtract the number of forms to get the number of unique words minus proper nouns.
5. Since there are some high frequency proper nouns, if I set the frequency low, it will result in considerable double counting, so I will have to look at the exported word list and make a rough estimate for adjustment. The result is not exact, but reasonably good for my purpose.